Conventionally, a common method for searching a lost child in an amusement park, a department store, or elsewhere, is for a human operator to broadcast that a child has been lost once an inquiry has been made about a lost child. A system for reducing personnel expenses has been demanded.
When a lost child is to be searched for using an image-monitoring device, it is necessary to mount the image-monitoring device in the area to be monitored and have an operator constantly watch an image of the monitored area by capturing it on camera. If a monitored area is large, a number of image-monitoring devices used necessarily increases, and the operator must simultaneously check a plurality of images, and/or the number of operators must be increased. Furthermore, the operator must memorize the features of a person to be searched for.
In the search system for reducing the load on an operator, an area including an image of a person is detected from an image inputted by an image input unit configured by at least one camera mounted in an area to be searched. If it is determined that the image of the person is a candidate for a lost child being searched for based on the features of the lost child who is an input target person to be searched for, the similarity, and the probability of the presence of a lost child determined for camera placement, then the image of the person as a candidate for the lost child and the information about the search are presented to a primary searcher, recorded, and transmitted to a candidate information communication terminal device of a secondary searcher who is, for example, an employee of an amusement park, etc. (as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 9-114988).
Furthermore, as a system of detecting a specific person, a camera mounted in the facilities of an amusement park, etc. captures an image, the image is transmitted to an image management server, and the image data of a person to be retrieved according to the personal information from the image data stored in the image management server is retrieved (as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2002-24229).
As described above, a system of searching for a person to be searched for in the images captured by the image pickup apparatus arranged in the monitor area is in the development stage. However, in any of the above-mentioned inventions, an image captured by the image pickup apparatus arranged in the monitored area is to be temporarily transmitted to a server and stored therein. Therefore, the server requires a storage device with a large capacity. Additionally, when a plurality of image pickup apparatuses are mounted, the capacity required to store the images and the processing load increases. After an image is transmitted to the server and the server performs a person detecting process, the information about the person is transmitted to a primary searcher and a secondary searcher, taking a long time, allowing the target person to move and be lost.